How Trump helped Twitter find its true purpose | John Naughton

For years, people wondered what the platform was for, but now we know – it was to help the Donald control the global news agendaThere is a famous story about the great 19th-century statesman Gladstone on the campaign trail. During one of his trademark three-hour speeches, a little girl posed a question to her mother. “Mummy,” she supposedly asked, “what is that man for?” Since Twitter appeared in July 2006, people have asked the same question about it. An incredulous Daily Mail asked it and received no satisfactory answer. I mean to say, what possible utility could attach to a service enabling people to publish 140-character “tweets”? The very word tweet suggested that the thing was a geeky joke, an online toy that the founders created simply because they had the free time and the resources to do so.And now? Twitter has become the medium of choice for the most powerful man on Earth, enabling him to boast last week about the size of his “nuclear button”. There is even a Twitter bot – an automated script – @RealPressSecBot – that takes each Trump tweet and reformats it as a White House press office statement. Continue reading…

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/07/how-donald-trump-helped-twitter-find-its-true-purpose